The Only Talent Pool That Is Growing | EVPeasy #19

Every hiring strategy assumes you can find people. Lyndsey Simpson’s argument is that the maths behind that assumption has quietly stopped working.

Lyndsey Simpson is CEO of 55/Redefined and author of The Age Rebellion. On episode 19 of EVPeasy, she set out the numbers. Populations need a fertility rate of about 2.1 to hold steady. The UK is at 1.4. Canada is at 1.2. Every nation on earth is now below the line, with sub-Saharan Africa the only region forecasting youth population growth.

The consequence for employers is not abstract. The youth talent pool is shrinking by 3 to 5 per cent a year, and on current trends will be around a quarter smaller in twenty years. The over-60s pool is growing by more than 40 per cent. Whatever your attraction strategy is, the group it targets is contracting and the group it ignores is expanding.

Her phrase for it is blunt: if you don’t have an age strategy, you don’t have a growth strategy.

The cost argument, inverted

The usual boardroom objection is that experienced people are expensive. Simpson’s counter is to change the measure from return on investment to return on experience, and to go looking in the company’s own data.

What she finds tends to surprise people. In professional services, the 40 per cent of a workforce aged over 50 can be responsible for the large majority of global revenue, because they bring the new business in. That relationship rarely shows up in reporting, which aggregates by team and by financial line rather than by age.

In high-volume roles, the pattern is retention. People who take a contact centre or store role later in life are usually choosing that work rather than treading water between jobs, and they do not leave for an extra pound an hour. The attrition difference is substantial.

Your careers site is doing the filtering

The part most relevant to employer brand teams is the smallest change. “Digital native.” “Energetic.” A photo grid where everyone is 25. None of that is a policy, and all of it is a signal.

Her line on it: nobody wants to walk into a nightclub and be the oldest person in the room. If the imagery does not include anyone who looks like the candidate, they conclude the job is not aimed at them, and they are usually right.

What an age-inclusive EVP looks like, in her account, comes down to three things. Flexibility first, and not just part time. Doubling holiday allowance at half pay costs nothing and buys a great deal. Sabbaticals as standard. Learning second, with older employees explicitly inside the plan for new skills rather than quietly outside it. Inclusion third, and here she points at a gap most employers have not noticed: more UK employees now have elder care responsibilities than childcare, while parental leave is what gets publicised.

AXA’s UK workforce spans 17 to 83. At Veolia, around half the workforce is over 50 and one per cent is over 75, and the attraction campaigns say so out loud.

The companies getting this right are not doing charity. They are going where the talent still is.